


A collection of missing statements that had no bearing on the end of the world

by Eturni



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Blood and Violence, Body Horror, Canon-Typical Unreality, Canon-Typical Violence, Child Death, Claustrophobia, Compulsion, Death, Depression, Domestic Violence, Gen, Hospitals, Police, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Statement Fic, Suicidal Ideation, almost crushing, call of the void, canon typical coersion, deliberate retraumatisation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-25
Updated: 2020-04-01
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:14:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 22,716
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23313715
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eturni/pseuds/Eturni
Summary: Piles of nonsense over on Tumblr postedthischallenge? Fun countdown? For Season 5 and I felt the need to get involved despite never having attempted this before. Because 8 fake statements in as many Days cannot be as hard as all that, right?Statement fics for Vast, Buried, Spiral, Dark, Stranger, Slaughter, Lonely and Beholding which will be updated daily leading up to the big day on 2nd.Tags will be updated as it progresses, characters appear more as a mention than as proper appearances and I'll try to warn at the start of specific chapters for anything more concerning than what what's canon-typical.
Comments: 23
Kudos: 10





	1. Falling Star

**Author's Note:**

> _Statement of Erica Smith, regarding an incident in which she became untethered from the Earth whilst stargazing during a meteor shower._

_Statement of Erica Smith, regarding an incident in which she became untethered from the Earth whilst stargazing during a meteor shower. Original statement given September 1st 2013. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.  
Statement begins._

So, you know how the Earth just kind of hangs in the middle of space? There’s not any such thing as up, not really, it’s all just about how far you have to go before down becomes up again. No matter where you are on the planet you’re just kind of being held down to the surface against an up that’s everywhere all at once. The direction that’s up for you is impossibly far down for someone on the other side of the planet.

It sometimes kind of feels like we’re just waiting for the gravity to be turned off. Like one day someone’s going to hit the release button and we’ll all just kind of drift off into all of that space out there.

I don’t know if it’s something everyone feels but I’ve heard it referenced enough. It’s some sort of French term but it’s pretty much the _call to the void,_ supposed to be some left over part of our monkey brains that tells us, right at the edge of something very high, to jump and look for the next branch along. To test out how far away we can be from safety and still catch ourselves.

I always kind of got that too. It used to send a shiver through me, you know, as a little kid. I’d be walking along the edge of the cliff at Dover when we went on holiday, or looking down a long, spiralling staircase down into the centre meters and meters below me and I’d just… Just want to jump.

I could imagine it perfectly. How it would feel to throw myself over the edge, to feel the wind and the floor rising up to meet me. How my hands or legs, or even head, might catch on the other railings on the way down. How the floor would feel when I finally came to that terrible and sudden stop. Which is why, of course, I couldn’t imagine _why_ that little pull was there every time. That soft, patient urge telling me that I could just lean out further, just a little further, until gravity took its inevitable hold and pulled me the rest of the way. Down and down.

The thing is, that wasn’t the only time I felt it. Sometimes I would get that feeling and I would be nowhere near the edge of anything. I would just not have the edge of anything to see.

That doesn’t make any sense really, does it? Let me try again.

I’ve always loved the sky. Stargazing, looking at clouds and deciding what they looked like, sunsets. All that sort of thing. When I was young we used to live in Shalford, which is honestly as much a through road as it is an actual village, and the only ones who really know it are people that live in the area, people coming to see the old mill, and some really hardcore fans of Phil Collins. Still, there’s pretty much everything you need and there’s plenty of nature about.

So on days when the weather and my mum permitted it I used to go off down the common and lay down to watch the sky. When the grass was short enough that I couldn’t see it in my peripheral and all that I could see above me was bright endless sky that feeling would come over me again. I could feel that pull in my chest and the distinct feeling that, at any moment, the ground beneath me would figure out that ‘up’ wasn’t real. That it would very suddenly become the ground above me and I would fall down into the sky.

If I could convince my parents to let me out at night the feeling of it was even sharper. With the night shrouding the edges of the world and no chance of accidentally spotting the horizon I would lie on my back and lose myself in the far off lights and the endless, open dark. Sometimes, for just a brief moment, it felt as though I was coming loose from the ground, the tug in my chest that always pulled me down and over the edge instead pulling me out towards the sky.

I wouldn’t say it ever truly _bothered_ me, but I just remember being very aware of it ever since I was a teenager. 

In fact, on the contrary, I had such an enduring love for the stars that my parents gifted me a telescope for my thirteenth birthday. I enjoyed using it well enough when I was in the house, and I always took it with me when I went out because I didn’t want my parents to feel that I wasn’t grateful for it. It was just that when I had the opportunity I much preferred to lay out under the stars and let myself feel the impossible distance without anything grounding me to the horizon.

So a couple of weeks ago, Monday the… 12th? It might have been the 13th. Something like that. Either way, there was going to be a meteor shower because of debris from when Swift-Tuttle, the comet, that passed over like 20 years ago or something.

I’ve always sort of thought they were romantic; the idea of so many shooting stars at once, so many people making wishes on them. Like, you could have hundreds of people looking at the same spot of light at once and finding some sort of meaning in it. I didn’t have anyone to go with myself, but it’s hard to really feel lonely about it when there are so many other people theoretically doing the exact same thing. It’s kind of nice.

So, I packed up my little Fiat Punto and I headed out to Mickleham, near Leatherhead in the North Downs. There were supposed to be clouds coming over in the West and I figured Norbury Park was as good a place as any to get a decent view of the shower without all the light pollution. I’d been up near there a couple of times camping when I was a kid and despite the necessity of navigating the M25 it wasn’t too far away from the main roads and seemed a decent sort of spot for it.

The night was fairly mild given that it was the middle of August and I’d packed a jacket, a flask of tea, a blanket and some binoculars just in case, though I didn’t really expect to use them. I took myself up to one of the viewing spots and was surprised to find it completely empty other than one solitary figure near the little bench meant for viewing the valley during the day.

I suppose he wasn’t all that noteworthy himself, likely just a fellow stargazer, and I wouldn’t really have even paid him any attention apart from how odd it was that he was the only other one out. But of course I was paying attention and, in a shift of the light from the moon, I thought that I saw scars on him. Lichtenberg figures, which I honestly only know for some research I did for a fanfic about a year or so back. For just that moment when I thought I could make those scars out it was like he was looking at me and… judging.

I suppose it’s a weird thing to assume about a stranger I couldn’t see right in the dark. But it just kind of felt as though he was weighing me up or something, you know? Maybe figuring out if it was worth sticking around or finding somewhere completely quiet, given that he gave me a little bit of a nod and then moved on elsewhere.

I didn’t really realise exactly how odd it felt with him staring at me until he’d already moved away. Not like your usual creepy guy at night odd, though. Like my stomach had gone up and I was settling back into my own skin, you know, that feeling if you take a dip too fast in the car or those first few seconds of drop on a really good roller coaster. But once he was gone it passed pretty quickly and yeah it gave me a bit of a shiver, cuz it was weird, but I’d pretty much dismissed the whole thing by the time I had the blanket set out and ready.

At first there wasn’t anything strange about it at all. Your usual run of the mill meteor shower; or as run of the mill as you can _get_ watching points of light burning up in the atmosphere and streaking across the sky.

Then I started to get that feeling. The sky stretching endless until it could have been in front of me or below just as well as above. For a moment I reached out and felt the cool, slightly damp grass beneath me. I clutched at the blades of it as though it would keep me grounded as the world seemed to turn around me and, finally, release me away from its hold.

I didn’t let go. I swear I didn’t let go _and yet_ at the same time I wasn’t holding on. Almost as though I never was. I felt it was I came loose, shook from the side of the Earth and yet I had only my own imagined sense of it. I couldn’t actually feel where the ground was behind me, though for the first few moments of that long, terrible, rapturous fall I _swore_ that I could tell where it was. How far I was going.

Then nothing. Like it never was there to begin with. As though I could have been moving away from its surface for my entire life. It was getting faster, the pull in my chest swirling with that feeling in my stomach that I had come loose and separate from gravity and my entire body was just waiting to catch up to what my gut felt. The only true sense I could get of the speed of the fall was how quickly the air rushed past my head. I did not know where the ground was and the sky continued to stretch ahead with only silent stillness.

I remember at one point I tried to turn around, trying to catch a glimpse of the ground that I had left behind. There was nothing there, I mean of course there wasn’t. There wasn’t any ground. No up or down. I was still falling, yes, but the falling didn’t have a direction, it was just air and movement and when I _did_ turn there was no sensation of something pulling at my back, only the knowledge that I was still falling in a direction that I just couldn’t _feel_.

I couldn’t have told you how long I was there; perpetually feeling the wind rush like I was falling but with my stomach permanently in that first moment of faux weightlessness. At times I didn’t even know if I was truly in my body or if it was some kind of bizarre out of body experience where even the rest of the world fell away.

All I knew was that I was stuck in endless movement that my body could not sense, and that even the stars seemed to be getting no closer to me. The vast, sparkling sky around me opened up in a way that was so familiar and yet offered not an ounce of comfort to me.

I tried to pinch myself awake but my arms would not move. I tried to cry out but the air rushing past stole the sound from my lips and filled my lungs so far that I could barely force it back out. I think that I might have tried to cry but by the time it got to that point I barely had the energy for anything other than a few stray tears that were pulled away by the wind as soon as they had formed.

It didn’t take long for confusion to become horror to move to acceptance. It felt like hours, maybe days, but it couldn’t have been that long at all. In almost the very moment that I accepted my place out in that empty starlit void I found myself very much alert and back with myself.

You know, I still couldn’t tell you _how_ I got back to my car. I remember being away from everything and coming back to the ground but I can’t…. I _couldn’t_ have just _landed_ there, I know that, because it’s not the sort of thing that really happens. It’s more an out of body sort of thing than actually… Well I didn’t... All I mean is that when I came to my senses from whatever it was I must have still been up on the viewpoint.

It’s just that I don’t actually remember that.

All I can remember is that deep need to be away from the ground, to just keep falling until there was nowhere left to fall, and then the feeling that I was settling back into myself. Still with that faint, gentle urgency in my chest to just jump but of course there was nowhere to jump. Just- just me holding my car keys with the little picnic blanket already neatly folded up in the boot as though nothing had gone amiss.

I guess it could be a mental block or something, you know? Like, I blinked myself out of it and just did everything on autopilot until my mind caught up enough to really pay attention. But I just sort of wonder, what if it wasn’t? What if I just kept moving? What if I had been falling and falling and when I woke up I had taken myself somewhere that I could fall even further?

I wake up at night sometimes still dreaming of falling and I can’t always tell if it excites or terrifies me. Either way I don’t think I’ll be going on any scenic cliffside walks any time soon. You know, just in case.

_Statement ends_


	2. Hold Still

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Statement of Sandra Walker, regarding an incident during an MRI scan at St Thomas’ Hospital.

_Statement of Sandra Walker, regarding an incident during an MRI scan at St Thomas’ Hospital. Original statement given 11th February 2014. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, The Archivist.  
Statement begins._

I’ve never actually been claustrophobic. I feel like I should let you know that at the start. This isn’t some moment of panicked delusion that happened to someone _just having a moment_ because one of their phobias got hit with a sledgehammer.

I’ll admit I’m not the type of person who enjoys closed spaces, and I’m not exactly unaware of the fact that I’m fat. There’s a higher chance of me getting wedged somewhere than your average skinny twenty-something. Yeah, I get it. But I wasn’t actually _afraid_ of closed spaces. Could just as easily take them as leave them and I was more than well acquainted with having to squeeze in a lift or get into a tight space to get cleaning supplies off the shelf.

So I didn’t have any reason to think there’d be any problem when my husband took me up to St Thomas’ last Thursday for an MRI. Well… I didn’t think there’d be _this_ kind of problem when I went for the scan at least. Of course I was worried about the actual results. What it meant that I’d been given an appointment only two weeks after my blood results had come back with “something they needed to get a better look at”.

I’d been feeling a bit lethargic for a couple of months beforehand and finally bothered to go to the GP when I almost fell asleep driving to work. I guess I was expecting the usual brush off. Try getting some more exercise, as if I didn’t do an active enough job as a cleaner, and make sure I kept to a sleep schedule. Instead they gave me the usual spiel but actually ordered up a couple of tests to see if anything else was behind it.

I guess getting the results back was a mixed blessing. It’s nice to be vindicated, that there’s actually something wrong and you’re not just making up stories, but when you call radiography and get an appointment in a fortnight you kind of start to wish they hadn’t found anything at all.

So yeah, I guess I went into St Thomas’ with a decent amount of worry about what it all meant, but they’d given me some fact sheet or other about what to expect from the MRI itself and I thought the process was all in good hands so I was mostly just trying to think positive and wishing I’d had a better CD to bring than my husband’s best of Motown.

We sat in the waiting room for what must have been about two and a half hours after our appointment. One of those things with the NHS, I guess. You get the appointment when you need to but once they’ve got you in you can be waiting the whole day to actually be seen by anyone.

I remember distinctly watching people arrive in the waiting room and going out again. A constant change that very quickly started to wear thin on my nerves. I know I was more short tempered than the admin at the desk deserved by the third time I went up to ask about when, exactly, I was likely to get seen. I can’t rightly remember her name but I think it was Laura or Larissa or something like that. Either way she looked about ready to just tell me to sit back down, or else to go out on her break before I could actually reach the desk.

I saw her fix a smile to her face that didn’t meet her eyes and, while I felt some sympathy for her given that it wasn’t actually her fault that I hadn’t been seen, it did not stop me from being completely annoyed that I was being kept around waiting while an ever increasing parade of faces actually got seen to.

I sometimes wonder if that’s why it chose me. If it was some kind of punishment that I could have avoided if I’d just been willing to sit and wait for the actual radiographer to turn up. Because I am absolutely certain that the person I sent to was _not_ a real radiographer.

I was once again informed that the radiographer I was meant to see had been held up and that I would be seen to just as soon as he became available.

I feel as though it wasn’t the most unreasonable thing in the world to point out that this was almost three hours later and that I could absolutely _not_ take another day off work to traipse halfway across London because they couldn’t sort themselves out better and did they, perhaps, have anyone else that I could see instead.

Now, I admit, that it might not have been those exact words that I used but it was something to that effect. Just a little stronger.

A moment later a nurse seemed to come out of nowhere. I suppose I wasn’t paying attention really but it definitely seemed as though one minute I was alone talking to… well, talking to the admin, who was looking increasingly frazzled, and the next minute there was a hand on her shoulder, pressing gently.

I never actually got her name, the nurse. She was a little shorter than me, with dark skin, probably Afro-Caribbean, but what really struck me was her eyes. I expected her to either look harried or to be staring at me ready for a fight. Instead when she met my eyes she just… she looked sad, almost resigned.

I guess I didn’t really notice it at the time, angry as I was, because when she said that I’d be best off waiting for my own appointment but that there was a chance that Ms Taylor could fit me in if I really insisted, I very much insisted.

Now I very much wish I hadn’t.

I think she knew, you know. That nurse. Looking back, I’m certain of it. She must have asked me no less than five times as she led me down the corridors if I was absolutely certain that I didn’t want to just wait for Mr Patel. If I’m honest by the end of it I was pretty snappy with her and yet she didn’t seem to get annoyed with me at all.

In fact when she handed me the hospital gown and directed me to go change she held my eyes with this kind of earnest look that took me back for a minute. I stood there frozen for just long enough that when she went into the other room I _know_ I saw her turn the light on before she started talking to the person in there. Like she’d been sat in the dark.

When I came back out the nurse was waiting for me and led me through into that room. Have you ever actually seen an MRI machine? It looks huge on the outside. This giant ring of humming metal that takes up most of the back wall of the room, the little bed they they put you on that looks more like a stretcher without the wheels. And yet, when it comes down to it, the actual hole that they feed you into is really barely big enough for a human body and a few inches of clearance.

Ms Taylor met me inside and seemed like a very pleasant woman at the time, though I did get a bit of an odd feeling from her. I don’t know whether it was because she seemed to smile just a little too widely to be genuine for someone having to squeeze in an extra patient or if it was the fact that when she shook my hand it left behind a faint red dust that left me a little wary about exactly how well she was washing her hands.

Still, all I had to do was get settled onto that stretcher-bed and I could manage that easily enough. I was thankful when Ms Taylor did actually put on some gloves before starting to move me into the right position to get the scans.

While we were getting sorted there was… well, she was supposed to tell me what was going to happen, according to the leaflet, but she didn’t really actually bother with that. She just asked if I had any questions about how it al worked but she asked it with this kind of flat disinterested expectation and I figured I was best not to push my luck after actually getting into the place so I just sort of shrugged it off and said the leaflet they gave me pretty much covered most of it.

I gave her my CD and she passed me the emergency buzzer. There was an odd sort of lightness to her words when she told me that I’d need it if I started panicking, to let her know that I needed to get out. Looking back I could say it was almost gleeful though at the time I just sort of passed it off as her trying to make light of it all. I supposed she had a lot of cagey patients who just didn’t like being in a big loud tube for half an hour. 

Then she parroted off what I assumed was a pretty standard disclaimer and warned me that “It could be a good long while. Hold Still. Or we have to start all over again.”

It was only when I was already being sent into the machine that I realised that the nurse had never actually brought Tony, my husband, along with me. Nor had she said a word since we got in, even though she stayed and watched me with those unwavering, terribly sad eyes. I supposed I didn’t really need him in the room, and it was only supposed to be if you were a nervous patient, but the idea that he wasn’t even outside the room waiting for me very suddenly left me with a strange sense of unease.

As the bed was moved up and into the scanner I was suddenly put in mind of being fed into the barely open mouth of some great starving beast. I brushed it off, of course. It was just because I was already feeling odd about Neil not being there. Or so I told myself.

At first I wasn’t really scared at all beyond that initial feeling of something wrong when I first went in. The machine itself was all bright lights and very loud noises. And I mean loud. I’d expected the headphones and the music to block out most of the sound of it but honestly the clunking of it was just awful. I could see why people got a bit uneasy in there.

It was why, supposedly, they were supposed to talk you through what was happening; let you know where you were at and how much longer things were likely to take. And yet I got nothing. From either of them. The only time Ms Taylor said anything was when I tried to ask a question about what was happening. Every single time they brushed it off, just said that things were going ‘as expected’. And every time, without fail, if I started to shift or to move there was that command. “Hold still.”

Now I couldn’t help it. I’m certain it was a lot longer than the half hour or so it’s supposed to take that I lay there as still as I could possibly get with those awful sounds so close. Of course I was going to fidget. There was no sympathy, just those words, every time a “hold still” with no change to the voice or how it was said. 

The longer the time went, the more I started to worry that there was no one there at all and I was just hearing something on repeat. It could just as easily have been a recorded voice played back endlessly every time there was movement. 

Every time I settled back in and tried to very patiently Hold Still as instructed. But I’d been listening to Motown for what felt like hours. The album had come to the end and started back up again and then it happened, so slowly that I can’t really tell you when I first became aware of it. It was another thing that I honestly ignored at first, assuming that everything just felt closer because I’d spent so bloody long in the thing.

It was real though, eventually I had to accept that. I swore, I _swear_ that the walls around me were closing in. The walls of the scanner itself were creeping steadily closer to my body, enclosing me in there.

Eventually I couldn’t just lay down and listen to that useless voice any longer. I shifted enough to try and look down and out of the machine. Make sure there still _was_ an out.

I almost screamed. Where my feet should have been out in the room and well clear of the scanner, instead the bulk of it seemed to extend into a tunnel that went right to the ends of my feet. And there, at the end of it all, something that looked distinctly like a wall. Not even a brick wall; earth and dirt like the end of this scanner was a freshly dug grave and this was my coffin.

Very quickly it was like I couldn’t breathe. The air around me seemed to grow hot and my skin prickled with the panic of it all. I pressed the buzzer desperately, repeatedly. This time when the voice came it was almost amused, that monotone lilting into something mockingly playful. “Hold Still now. Don’t want to be in there any longer than you have to, do you?”

I knew then that she had done this on purpose. That it was really happening and that this Ms Taylor, this probably fake radiographer had lured me in here to watch me be entombed in that damned machine though I couldn’t work out if it was as some sort of sick joke or if there was some sort of reasoning behind it. Maybe the admin staff getting back at me for how rude I had been.

When my children were younger I went to church every week that I could. Wanted to raise them right, with faith, though none of them actually ended up holding onto it in the end. For my part, though, I am religious. Or was. I believed in God; I just had bills to pay and couldn’t really afford to be picky about whether I did or didn’t work on Sundays.

I yelled at this woman to let me out. I threatened to contact her supervisors when this was over, that I would have her fired. I begged for my release and when the only thing I got in return was that very pleased little laugh I prayed. I prayed until my voice was hoarse when it pitched up every few seconds as the walls around me grew closer and closer until I _swear_ that they were touching me, pressing around me on every side like a metal and plastic body bag.

Then it only got tighter, squeezing me in from every side. I knew then, with a horrible sort of certainty that would have left me wailing with terror if my voice weren’t already so wrecked from the hours of screaming before, that I was going to die in that machine. It was going to crush me and devour me and whatever was left at the end would be brushed away carelessly by that inhuman radiographer. 

The press on my chest was steadily making it so hard to breathe that I started to see spots of darkness at the edges of my vision. I must have passed out, because the next thing I was aware of was my husband’s voice asking if I was doing okay.

I distinctly remember how light and… normal that woman’s voice sounded as she told my husband that I was fine. That I’d had _a bit of a funny turn_ while in the machine but that I should be fine in a few minutes and that it was nothing to worry about.

I couldn’t believe it. The nerve of it, or the fact that I was alive, or just how normal it all was. The bed moved and I came out from a very normal sized MRI machine and into a very normal hospital room. I would have thought that I’d fallen asleep and dreamt the whole thing if it wasn’t for the fact that my limbs were still trembling and my voice was too hoarse from the screaming to make any proper noises.

I wanted to grab my husband and shake him and tell him everything that had happened but then I looked over and saw Ms Taylor. She was looking at me with sharp, dark eyes and a knowing smile. Like she knew that there was no way anybody would believe me. It was right, of course. No one would actually _believe_ what had happened. No one but you people at least.

So I kept quiet, though I couldn’t decide on whether I wanted to try to yell more or just cry when that nurse handed me back my clothes and a glass of water while telling me that I should take my time getting dressed. She knew, and I know she knew. I don’t know whether she was that radiographer’s go-between, some unwilling pawn or if she was there purely to bring in sacrifices to this thing.

I pray that I never have to have another scan again.

I swear I never had a problem with closed spaces before but now I can’t so much as get into a lift without feeling that urge to scream with a voice that won’t work. Because I know, one day, whatever thing possessed that scanner, whatever wanted me to die crushed in that place, is going to come back for me.

Some days I live in such terror of it that I can only pray that it does so quickly rather than taunting me with every closet space and narrow hallway I come across.

_Statement Ends._


	3. No Exit

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Statement of Oleksiy Natrebko regarding… getting lost in Ikea.
> 
> Of course, getting lost in Ikea is something that I'm sure would look like a fluffy slice of life piece or shitpost in any other fandom and one that means anyone in TMA immediately knows to expect the Distortion. I am also certain that someone else will have done this before because even the Great Twisting sounds like a bloody Ikea. But still, enjoy <3

_Statement of Oleksiy Natrebko regarding… getting lost in Ikea. Original statement given 26th June 2015. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.  
Statement Begins._

A couple of years back I was just moving out into my own proper place for the first time. Well, I say my own, London prices are always going to be London prices even around Tower Hamlets so it was actually me and two of my friends. 

There was Mikhail Sobczak who I’d met through some other mutual friends growing up and who was a pretty laid back sort of a guy, and Peter Dawson, who’d been on my course at university and at least knew how to wash his own dishes even if he had no actual understanding of appropriate noise levels for the time of day.

I was only about a year out of university, having got my PCGE. I was looking for a job I might actually want and was working down at the local take away to cover costs while spending most days wildly swinging between job hunting and spending far too much time doing absolutely nothing on Twitter. I’d been training to work with SEN kids though, students with Special Educational Needs, and jobs weren’t easy enough to come by that it seemed worth fighting for a teaching position I’d spend the entire time hoping to leave. Aside from that I was sort of hoping that I wouldn’t be in London long term. It suits a lot of people but the press of people and the self-righteous sense of being busy never suited me.

Peter, for his part, had all the expected aspirations of what it would be like to ‘work with underprivileged kids’ and ‘help them take a real interest in learning’ or whatever he’d picked up from Kes or Dead Poets’ Society or whatever else. Didn’t really matter to me as long as he was helping pay the rent, even if it was all a bit sanctimonious for my tastes.

Honestly it was a bit of a miracle, or just good luck I guess, that I’d gone to uni at all. I’m more of a grafter than anything, and I would have been happy enough to get in at some entry level job somewhere and work my way up. Mikhail was the same, only about a year older than us and about ready to be promoted to the manager of the local Spoons. Thing is, the whole thing with the spike in tuition fees came in the year after I got into uni. If I was looking into it a year later I know I just wouldn’t have bothered at all.

But it is what it is and the three of us ended up sharing rent on a two bedroom flat. There’d been a fair few arguments before we even moved in about whose bedroom would be what was technically the living room. I ended up drawing the short straw. I had obviously been a little too vocal about my intentions to be out of central London once I had a proper job lined up and they figured that the one likely to be first out may as well have the less permanent sleeping arrangements.

They were bastards but I also honestly couldn’t say that it didn’t make a degree of sense, so I begrudgingly let them have their way.

Now, with little enough money to spare and my own ideas of not being here long term firmly in my head, it seemed to make enough sense to just get a bit of cheap flat-pack furniture for my ‘room’. That way it could either be taken apart or abandoned when I left without much fear of being sentimental about it. Hard to get depressingly attached to wardrobe when it has more clones than a Star Wars film and you could pick one up pretty much in the nearest city to any place you might move in the country.

So, one of the Saturdays in August Peter and I drove down to the Greenwich Ikea with a car barely long enough for what would need to go into it. He came with me because we were going to get bits of stuff for the flat in general and Mikhail was stuck working. Aside from that we’d have honestly probably struggled to get it into the car with three of us. It would be enough of a problem as it was but we figured if we could just bump all the seats down and twist it the right way over his lap in the front seat it would be okay.

We each picked up one of those papers and Argos sized pencils and dragged along a trolley knowing we’d be picking up some fairly hefty stuff at the end. I couldn’t have told you anything about the day up to that point, or even the damned shop itself, that was out of the ordinary. There was no warning at all before we were already in there and by that point I’m sure it was too late.

I don’t know when it started. When things started to change. Some of it was normal enough that maybe… maybe it wasn’t weird at all and just a coincidence.

I know there’s a whole thing about guys being lost and useless in shops but it’s not that. I mean, Ikea always feels endless and contradictory, even on a normal day. Yeah, maybe a couple of the set ups looked the same or it seemed like we’d gone through the bathroom stuff twice. We’d probably just ducked through the wrong little snicket between sections and doubled back on ourselves. Or followed the wrong arrow.

I figured that sort of thing happened to people a lot to be honest and even though Peter looked a bit put out by it he never actually said anything. Probably thought about the same thing that I did.

Then, slowly, there were fewer people around. Like I said that could be… I mean it was late Saturday morning by that point so it’s hardly likely it would get _less_ busy on it’s own but it could have just been a coincidence.

Still, it gave both of us a bit more pause as we moved on. It almost felt like it could be one of those prank shows only Peter honestly wasn’t that good an actor and he honestly looked more freaked out than I was. 

When we passed by the room with the black couch, dark blue bookcase and faux oak table for the fourth time Peter _really_ started to get antsy. Started looking around all nervous like he wondered if he was being set up too. I couldn’t blame him, at that point we seemed to be completely alone in the whole place. We wondered between ourselves for a good few minutes if there’d been some sort of fire alarm or bomb threat and we just hadn’t heard but it seemed to unlikely that they would have found everyone but us two.

Eventually he said that he was going to see if he could find someone who worked there. It was quiet and empty enough that we figured we could call out to each other if we found anything and no one could really complain. A few minutes ticked by and I rounded a corner into what looked kind of like the home department, the bit with the accessories that usually means you’re nearing the warehouse?

I called out for Peter, letting him know what I’d found and to get over as quickly as he could. His voice when it came back was quieter than it should have been but it did seem that he’d heard me. We called back and forth a few times before he just stopped responding. One second his voice seemed to be getting closer and then the next time I called out there just wasn’t a reply.

I finally started to get that sense of dread gnawing in my stomach. If someone working there had found him he’d have called to me. If he’d been injured I’m sure I would have heard it given the volume of his voice.

I knew it was foolish, that I didn’t actually know where he was, but I turned back then. Left the trolley and headed back towards the last place I thought I had heard his voice come from despite the ever increasing surety that something had gone terribly wrong.

Before long I was lost again among the maze of arrows that seemed to forever send me back to the same places and yet never to the same place that they did the time before. Then I started getting hungry and I realised that I had no sense of exactly how long I had been in there. I could occasionally smell the meatballs and tried to make my way towards it but that was as futile as any other endeavour. Honestly, I don’t even know if I was just hallucinating it for hunger. I hadn’t smelled them once before I decided that I was hungry.

I couldn’t tell you how long I was there searching. There’s no natural light in an Ikea, just an endless florescent sky in flickering strip-lights above. They torture people like that, you know. Put them somewhere the light never fades. Where it’s too bright to fully turn off your brain and you never feel quite rested. I couldn’t even rely on my watch. One minute it said six but I could look back in what I thought was 20 minutes, maybe half an hour, and see that it read three. It made no sense. It was… exhausting.

Then there was the man. Or not man. Mostly man. He was tall, blonde, and looking over one of the bookcases with a curious tilt of his head. It all seemed so normal at first. I felt my legs shake and threaten to collapse with the relief of someone else being there. I was about to call out to him when something in my gut told me to stop. To not draw attention to myself.

It was then that I noticed the limbs that seemed to stretch out just a little too far to be real. He honestly looked a little bit Scandinavian if you squinted and ignored the fact that everything about him was wrong.

I tried to back away, to go somewhere else before he knew that I was there but the moment I took a step backwards he turned and he smiled at me and it was… It wasn’t even a smile, not really. He asked if I had found myself a little lost. And then he laughed. It was almost gentle and yet the sound of it turned my blood to ice in my veins.

I can’t remember what I actually said to him, only that I made some excuse about looking for a friend and then fled around the nearest corner. For the first time since this started I was relieved when I looked back around that corner to see a completely different set up of bedrooms. Unfortunately, once I’d started seeing him it didn’t stop. I could have been there for days and still the only person I saw was this not-person occasionally appearing from nowhere, seemingly purely to taunt me.

I couldn’t even find what scant comfort might be gained from beds or chairs for the tormenting labyrinth of nonsensical arrows and abruptly disappearing snickets. When I became so tired that I couldn’t imagine being able to go a step further I was suddenly completely unable to find any of the pods of fake bedrooms that I know I had passed dozens, if not hundreds, of times.

Sometimes I slept fitfully on the ground or in a poorly shaped chair but it never felt refreshing and always, always, I would wake up to the faint sound of melodic, discordant laughter and the clutching fear that the thing was beginning to look for me.

I could not begin to tell you why it was always these spikes of terror that woke me from sleeping. I couldn’t even say _why_ I was so scared, what indescribable horrors I thought he might visit on me if he only caught up. I had no way of knowing myself. He had never been threatening when I passed him. Not… Well, not out loud at least. His _existence_ was a threat. I knew that in the same way you know to avoid certain streets or to keep your head down when you saw certain types of guys hanging around. 

Sometimes I would spot him in time to turn back around. Sometimes he would be looking at me from among light fixtures with an intense, frightening glee or I would see those sharp, too-long fingers wrapping around the corner of the wall and I would feel panic seize every muscle in my body urging me to run away.

Still he was there, hidden and watching in corners, all smiles with too many teeth. Once or twice I caught sight of it in a mirror and what was there was somehow more terrible than what I saw of it in person. It was stretched somehow and all the too-long pieces of it seemed to be trying to curl into themselves.

After the terror settled I would occasionally even see a bed but if tried to collapse exhausted onto it I would find myself not tired at all. Or at least not able to sleep.

Once, just once, he asked me if I needed to find a door. By this point I wasn’t sure about talking to it. It felt like any interaction with this thing could only be bad, but it was still the only thing remotely close to a person that I had seen in what felt like days.

I swallowed up the fear and I told him, without showing any of the fear that I felt, that what I needed was the exit. 

He laughed. He laughed and said _“There’s an exit right here.”_

Sure enough when I looked there was a door right next to him where I was absolutely certain there hadn’t been one before. I had long ago noted and tried all of the fire escapes and found that they did not function. Something in me knew that this one would. If I were to just go over and press down on that bar it would open without complaint and I would be away from Ikea. I just didn’t know where I _would_ be.

I told him thank you, and honestly how weirdly British is that, but that I would try to find my own way out. I was desperate, sure, but I was not yet that desperate. I tried not to think about how little time I likely had until I _was_ desperate enough to take the offer. I still wonder what would have happened if I’d said yes then.

I didn’t though. I backed away and I moved onwards, thundering heart telling me to get as far away as possible. It felt like mere minutes later that I turned a corner and there were people. Normal people. The place just as busy as it should have been by all rights on the Saturday morning that I was certain it was not.

I don’t know whether it was the relief or the hunger and sleep deprivation catching up to me but I barely got a few more steps in before I collapsed. When I woke up it was with paramedics hovering over me and chattering away confused about something or other, asking how long I’d even been there. I laughed and it sounded strained, warped enough to set that cold stone of terror into my stomach again. I laughed and yet I could have cried.

I told them I didn’t know. I asked where Peter was. They put out a request over the tannoy while the paramedics talked about getting me to the hospital for fluids. It all went in a bit of a daze to be honest but I at least got discharged in the same day.

I never saw Peter again. Spoke to the rozzers, reported him missing and everything, tried to get them to find out what had happened to him. I thought they were taking it pretty seriously, too. I tried to downplay that weird man but he was the only one I could accuse so I had to say something. Even though I made him so much more normal there was this kind of understanding when I went through that part of the statement. One of the officers left and was replaced by a different one. Seemed slightly harder edged. I wondered if we’d somehow stumbled across a serial killer or something but either way they were honestly listening.

Never heard anything back, though. Never heard _anything_ else about Peter. Honestly, it all felt like it had to be so much more than a mundane crazed killer that had got to Peter but still… Guess it’s human nature to try and turn this sort of thing into something that fits into a neat, familiar box. Instead all I know for certain is that Peter is most likely dead and that the rozzers do not have any intention of divulging any information to me.

I went home in a bit of a daze, with no furniture, no intention of going back again and no way I could explain the whole thing to Mikhail without sounding like a complete lunatic. So I made it simple. Made it normal. There’d been an incident. He’d gone missing. The police were dealing with it. We still had daily life and I had furniture to buy, though I couldn’t bring myself to take Peter’s room even with the inconvenience of sleeping in the living room. Between the Emmaus and the nearest British Heart Foundation doing a sofa that didn’t take up my side of the living space, I managed to get everything I needed without setting foot back into Ikea.

It’s taken me longer than I wanted to find a proper job but I finally have something lined up. I’m moving out and we’d long since sent the bits of Peter’s stuff that his parents wanted back up to the Midlands. It feels like something’s coming to an end, like some time somewhere is running out though I have no idea why or what. Either way, before I go, I figured it was about right that I came and gave you guys my statement.

The more time that passes, the less sure I am that the police ever actually did anything and someone should know. Someone besides just me should know the truth of it. So there you are, down on paper before I set off next week.

I hate to say it, too, but I’m honestly considering hiring a moving van and actually taking some of the furniture with me. I wouldn’t have been able to afford much of anything else without charity shops and the thought of going back to Ikea, the possibility of seeing that too wide smile and too sharp fingers… I dunno, I guess I’m weirdly thankful for it, feels like it saved me from something much worse. Besides, they’re a bit unique and you can tell the places they’ve taken a beating. Seems somehow a lot more fitting for wherever I go than something from an endless repeating line of the same soulless pieces.

_Statement ends._


	4. Don't turn back

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Statement of Daniel Hillam, regarding the shadow entity in his home and subsequent death of his brother Jason.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains the death of a child. It's described vaguely and most of it happens in shadow but is definitely and unmistakably there for anyone who needs to skip that sort of content.

_Statement of Daniel Hillam, regarding the shadow entity in his home and subsequent death of his brother Jason. Original statement given 24th November 2012. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, The Archivist.  
Statement Begins_

When I was a child there was a monster at the bottom of our stairs. Now, I’m sure that a lot of children would tell you the same thing, and I’m certain that a lot of them would be wrong. Not all of them, though. I know I certainly wasn’t.

It’s the kind of thing that I guess that was always in the back of my mind somewhere. You grow up and there are stories about monsters under the bed or in the wardrobe. There’s always something a little frightening about the dark. I mean, yeah, of course, people will tell you it’s mostly because we can’t see predators and all of that but honestly there are worse things that come out at night than some nocturnal animal we evolved past worrying about centuries ago. I’ve seen one of them myself.

I always remember being worried when I went up the stairs to bed. It felt like there was something there at the bottom of the stairs just… watching me. Back then I used to call it a ghost. I also used to think that it was kind of confined there; watching me with intent and wanting to chase me up and… I don’t know honestly. Possess me? Hurt me somehow? Maybe just give me a really good scare, honestly. I kind of imagined it like one of those white ladies. Some old woman in a nondescript white dress that could have just as easily been a bathrobe; glaring at me because I was in _her_ house and being a noisy child.

I used to play around with it, like it was just a game. I felt like bravery, giving my self a little scare and knowing that I was safe the entire time because it wasn’t real and it couldn’t hurt me. Of course, it was the bit in my gut that told me there was real danger that was right. I was never safe at all, no matter what all the logic I’d been taught told me.

I used to start at the bottom of the stairs with both lights on. At that point I could already feel my heartbeat start to pick up, knowing what I was about to do. That my little game was about to begin. I would keep my back tot he doorway where I _knew_ the ghost was lurking as I moved just enough to the side to flick the light switch; plunging the hallway and stairs into darkness and leaving the top landing as the only bright spot in the house.

The second I pushed it I was off and running, up the stairs on all fours until I could pass into the light that I believed protected me. Then and only then would I look down into the dark below and imagine that I could see or feel the ghost watching me with annoyance; at her loss or my childish games.

Then I would turn off that light and carefully watch down the stairs as I moved towards the room I shared with my brother. Jason was two years younger than me and, at that time, had to go to bed half an hour earlier which made me feel very grown up at the time. Of course it wasn’t enough time for him to actually be asleep most of the time and he would always ask the same thing, whether I had seen the ghost this time.

I usually said no, of course not, though I occasionally wondered if I could see a shape shift in the shadows. I made up this story that the only time she was truly real was while you were _going up_ the stairs and that if you turned around at that point and saw her it would give her enough time to catch up and make me a ghost too. This was not what I actually thought but it seemed just the right amount of scary for Jason who was pretty much enraptured by the whole thing.

I guess I wondered a little bit, though. Wanted to know exactly how far I could push things. How safe I could be from the ghost, the monster.

Most importantly, when Jason turned 9 and was allowed to go to bed at the same time as me, I wanted to show off.

The very first night he was allowed to stay up later he started to play the game with me. I, quite magnanimously as I reminded him regularly, always let him go first because he was younger and slower; more at risk of the ghost catching him and taking him. It was true, I _was_ faster than him. Enough that sometimes I used to catch up as we both thundered up the stairs, jostling against him and once even knocking him into the bannister hard enough that he bruised on his shoulder.

Mum wasn’t happy at that. Said we had to stop playing, that it was too dangerous and one of us was going to trip and fall right down and really injure ourselves. I promised I wouldn’t bash into him any more, that we wouldn’t do anything dangerous. Obviously mum thought that we were at least going to be more careful, maybe even thought it was me agreeing to stop playing entirely, because she let it drop at that.

Instead the next night I decided I was going to try being braver. I told Jason I was going to do it again regardless of what mum said; that I knew what I was doing and the ghost didn’t really scare me anyway. Of course neither of those things was true though I only knew one for sure at the time.

Jason, for his part, didn’t want to be left out and run the risk of me making fun of him for it later. I’m absolutely certain I’d been a bit smug about it when I said I was going to play anyway. He insisted he wanted to do it too and that he would make sure to be fast enough that there was no way I could catch up anyway. I remember I laughed at him for that. He took it was a challenge, like I didn’t believe it, but it was mostly because that’s what I was planning on anyway.

I turned the light out and Jason rushed up the stairs with an admirable amount of speed honestly. I went up too, facing forward and feeling my heart pound and the urge to run itch at all my muscles as I very slowly and deliberately walked up those stairs. I could feel the eyes on me, feel malice and amusement and no small hint of a threat but I was certain I would be safe because ghosts weren’t real despite how very real the fear of it felt.

I was maybe about halfway up when Jason realised I wasn’t keeping up behind him. He turned and I felt very pleased at the look of shock on his face at my daring to tempt fate. That’s what I thought it was at least. At first. It didn’t take long for what I thought was surprise to clearly become terror in my mind, especially when he tried to say something to me without any sound actually coming out and then fled to our bedroom.

Alone and halfway up the darkened stairs my nerve cracked and I ran the rest of the way up. The moment I was safe on the landing I turned and I swore I saw something shifting in the shadows halfway up the stairs. So close to where I had been when I started running. I didn’t dare to turn the light off even for the short distance it would take me to get to my room.

When I got into bed Jason immediately launched into an animated description of the shadowy thing that he had seen following me. There had been no true shape, no face, but he was certain he had seen eyes that were just pits darker than the shadow around them and had the distinct impression of form and movement even though he couldn’t describe it.

The whole thing made me feel sick and shaky but I tried to reassure him, still trying to convince myself that it was all just in our imaginations and that we were perfectly safe. I said that I’d been conducting an experiment and that I’d just proved the truth. It didn’t matter how fast we went, it only mattered that we didn’t _look back_ because it couldn’t get you as long as you didn’t show you were scared. Or as long as you didn’t see it. I can’t really remember for certain what excuse it was that I gave, only that I managed to convince myself and Jason that we were safe as long as we kept going without looking back.

I kept playing the game; kept testing it out going as slow as my trembling nerve and shaking legs would allow. Some nights I would break and have to run up and around. I always turned the landing light off after that first time, our parents had been so annoyed to head up to bed and find the light still on and had really told me off about it, but sometimes I wouldn’t dare slow down and look the way I had when I was younger. I just kept running. 

Jason didn’t play as often. That shadow had really freaked him out and he hated the dark even more than usual because of it. We were still brothers though, and occasionally my making fun of him would get too much and he’d snap and play too, though he was all too happy to go first.

Once or twice he even still turned around at the top, watching it over my shoulder with eyes he couldn’t tear away. It was almost like he was being forced to watch sometimes. On those nights he never failed to have nightmares.

The thing is, for all my fear of it I still wanted to believe in logic and… well, the real world. I was convinced that I wouldn’t see anything if it was me. I was wrong, of course, but there was no way of knowing it at the time. Still there was no way to bully or cajole Jason into letting me go first so that I could watch like he did sometimes so I just sort of let it be. It seemed more trouble than it was worth.

It _was_ more trouble than it was worth. And much more pain.

I can remember the night that it took Jason clear as a bell. They call it flashbulb memory, that sort of thing. I’d spent the last half hour of the night pretending to read The Faraway Tree, too tired to really concentrate but not wanting to admit that I was tired before my little brother or go to bed early.

When I asked him, Jason decided that he was playing tonight and stood right at the foot of the stairs, poised and shaking as always. I stood by the light and counted us down, stopping at 2 for far too long just to freak him out before loudly declaring 1 and flipping the light off.

I don’t really know what happened, for all I remember it so well. I felt more scared than usual that night, the monster looming more real in my thoughts, so I was going up just about as fast as Jason was. One second he was about a step and a half ahead of me and the next one of his slippers was off and tumbling down the stairs into the darkness.

We both turned but… well, he turned first. I know he did because I saw in his expression the exact second that his eyes caught that monster. I think I actually turned around faster when I saw the terror cross his face, as though it could have made a difference to look any quicker.

I saw it then; looming over us both. It was completely shapeless. Just… darkness, pure darkness. I don’t know why that caused such a primal panic in me. I thought I was going to lose control of my bladder, the way all my muscles seized up and the urge to run sparked into a terror so sharp that I couldn’t move at all.

True enough to Jason’s word there was something in that expanse of black that covered the ceiling that was darker even than the shadow around it and I could have sworn that it was looking at us from those spots of complete absence.

Then Jason screamed and I was brought back to myself. The thing had his leg; the shadows up to one of his calves before it heaved. I couldn’t honestly say that I believe a human can make the sound that I made then but I know that it came out of me. I saw Jason pulled down those stairs; heard the crack of his head against the step as he went.

He was screaming and I was screaming and frozen in place as I watched the shadows descend over him in a writhing blanket. I kept screaming and screaming until my mum came out of the living room demanding to know what had happened. She flicked the light switch and nothing happened. I couldn’t get enough breath around the screaming to say a single word. It wasn’t until she came forward to try and grab me, calm me down, that her foot hit Jason and suddenly the light came on like it should have before.

I can’t forget the look of terror that was etched onto Jason’s face and I know he had seen or known something truly terrible before that thing was done with him.

_It was a tragic accident, he fell down the stairs._ I remember the way that they repeated it like they could just make it true, make me believe it, if they said it often enough. Honestly? It came pretty close. I was young and grieving and adults are supposed to know how the world works but I was _so sure_ of what I’d seen, what I knew to be true.

I think the thing that swung it, other than never actually seeing that thing again, was their insistence that it wasn’t my fault. I knew what the shadow had done, I saw it with my own eyes, but they just kept saying it all the same; it wasn’t my fault that he fell. We’d been running and it could have happened to either of us.

I knew it wasn’t my fault but they seemed to think that I _should_ be thinking that it was. They sent me to a counsellor for it and, honestly, at first I thought she was actually listening to what I was saying. I knew she didn’t really believe me, about it being a ghost or a monster, but at least that _something_ had happened that wasn’t just Jason tripping down the stairs.

Then I heard her talking to my mum about it when I wasn’t supposed to be around. Saying it was just a way of dealing with the grief and the trauma. Said that it was common for children my age to come up with some external reason for a freak accident like that. That I was probably feeling guilty that I couldn’t have prevented it.

Then I heard my mum say that I probably felt guilty that it was me who always encouraged Jason to run up the stairs, even when they told us it was dangerous. Even when they told us we might fall. I don’t know if I imagined the blame, the bitterness, in her voice but I felt it starkly anyway. I know that even if she felt it back then, I couldn’t blame her. She only knew a nice, normal world where monsters didn’t reach out and snuff you out just because they could. She was right in the middle of her own pain and I know she would never have said it if she thought there was a chance I was listening.

But I was, and I heard. I honestly started to think that they were right, just a little bit. These people who had so much more experience than me. I grew up and I never saw that shadow again. I got more and more certain that it had all been something in my imagination to try and rationalise how such a horrible, random accident could make my own brother be there one minute and just gone the next. 

I hope, for most peoples’ sake, that this is where most of the statements given to the Institute end. This awful feeling of unease and guilt without any proper resolution of it all. The monsters just… go away. It isn’t where my statement ends, thought.

It’s been almost thirty years and I’d just about pushed it to somewhere that I could delude myself that it was over and that it was all so very, very mundane. Instead I’ve come in needing your help, needing you to do anything that might stop all of this repeating itself over again.

You see, the thing is, I’ve got kids of my own now. The oldest hasn’t quite hit double digits yet but certainly acts like he has when holding court with his sister. They’re happy and normal and I’ve done everything I can to _keep_ things that way for them. I don’t even mention their uncle. It feels like they’re too young to understand it.

Or… It used to feel that way.

A couple of nights ago, you see, I was just dropping off when there was a huge racket from outside the bedroom door. I came out to see the door to Janine’s room just closing tight despite the fact that it was about eleven o’clock and they should have been in bed hours before. 

When I went in to check on them they were pretending to sleep, of course. I remember that pretty well myself from being a kid, always thinking that I could pretend well enough to fool my parents. I tried a few times to ask what all the noise has been and they remained as still and silent as a game of sleeping lions.

When I returned to my room it was there. I almost missed it, in the passing glance I bothered to give the stairs as I passed. Yet with all of the shock of cold water being thrown onto me, the hazy memories of my childhood came back into sharp focus. This boogeyman that the adults in my life had spent years convincing me was nothing but a figment of my imagination was right there, staring up at me with eyes darker even than the shadows surrounding it.

I thought that I knew terror as a child; fleeing from this thing and watching my brother disappear into it’s hungry mass. I didn’t, of course, the true terror has come now that I have an honest understanding of just how powerless I am in the face of it. As a child I thought there was some force of will, some secret ritual or safe checkpoint that would grant immunity from the thing’s grasp. Now I know that it is inexorable. It will remain in patient waiting and ceaseless hunting until it catches its victim and this time it will be one of my own children.

I’ve taken to keeping night lights with them in their rooms, encouraging them to use as much light as they need to feel safe from the shadows. I have my own torch that I keep by the bed and shine down onto the landing every night as though it could keep it at bay despite knowing, with a certainty that eats at every breath I take, that there is nothing that I can do that will stop it before it decides that it is done with me.

I need your help. I don’t know what it is you even can do here but there must be something. You must have seen something like this before, know what could take this monster’s attention away. Anything you know, anything you can do, anything _I_ can do… just look into it and I will do what I need to. I can’t let it do this again.

_Statement Ends_


	5. Conference

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Statement of Faisal Khan, regarding his attendance at a work conference in Surrey and the creatures that attended with him.

_Statement of Faisal Khan, regarding his attendance at a work conference in Surrey and the creatures that attended with him. Original statement given 6th August 2011. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.  
Statement Begins_

I’m a chartered accountant with a pretty big firm working out of London. This summer there was a conference, the BAFA annual conference, being held at the De Vere Horsley Estate which is a conference centre just North of Guildford. There would be a few presentations, workshopping, and ample opportunity for some networking.

My manager put my name forward to go, which is one of those things that’s notionally a bit of recognition from the brass that they think you’re doing well and trust you not to doss off but honestly is more hassle than it’s worth.

It’s hardly helped by the fact that I’m not the most extroverted of people. Sure, I get along with colleagues at work and I’m not lacking in the ability to have a decent conversation with people, but I couldn’t honestly say that a centre full of people who were either total strangers to me or who I might have had a dozen phone calls with to discuss clients was my idea of a fun way to spend a few days.

Still, they had some decent speakers on and it all looks good during my yearly reviews so I didn’t kick up any fuss about it.

When I got there the place was actually pretty nice too. The main building is one of those vaguely soulless things that you kind of expect out of a conference centre but right across there was the Towers section and it’s actually a pretty interesting building. Not to mention that it’s pretty much just sat out in the countryside so I had plans to take a jog each morning before everything started so that I could take in the grounds and steel myself up to be cramped in for most of the day with strangers.

The centre staff were fine; a little harried but obviously well-versed in managing similar events so it didn’t take long to get set up with my room in the management centre. Everything about the place itself was fairly normal, run of the mill to be perfectly honest. I look back at it now sometimes and try to figure out if there was something that should have tipped me off; some obvious moment of _wrongness_ where I should have realised and backed out of the whole thing but it was just.. normal. Mundane and normal.

The way people talk about your Institute I suppose I half feel like this should be something where the course of the conference built up into this series of slowly increasing terrible things until it culminated into something truly awful on that last night but…. It didn’t.

It actually happened within the first day of me being there. The conference bit itself was almost entirely as expected. I suppose I could say that things seemed a bit off at the time. I knew one of the speakers quite well by reputation, though I’d never had the occasion to actually meet them before, and they were a lot more engaging in their presentation than I’d been led to believe. That was easy enough to brush off, assuming that either they had found something they truly enjoyed or that I was merely more enthralled by some very dry subject matter than a lot of my peers.

I suppose, thinking back on it now, there was also the refreshments. Courses and conferences like that always put out some tea and coffee at set times during the day, and if you’re lucky a few snacks at the lunch break though we’d been told in the joining instructions to bring or buy our own actual lunches. When I really look back though, that morning it did seem like they were all just going through the motions of getting a hot drink in the morning. Everyone rather dutifully went and got a cup full but I couldn’t honestly say that I saw a single one of them actually take a drink.

So maybe there were little signs that could have told me everything wasn’t quite what it seemed but it was that kind of just left of centre that gave the feeling of things being odd without really being alarming or obvious. There were probably more things I could have seen that were just so slight I never even thought about it.

Thing is, it all made sense. The people I did speak to knew their stuff and even commented on a few of the research papers that had been submitted that year. The presentations and workshops all made sense though I will admit to knowing some of it ahead of time. That’s how things go though, sometimes training is as much getting a refresher as learning to do things differently.

It wasn’t until dinner that evening that I really realised the half of what was happening. I was fully prepared to go into the little restaurant on my own and have a bit of a quiet dinner before everything devolved into drinks and socialising later. I don’t drink, obviously, but was expected to at least be around for rubbing elbows up until the first few people got too far gone to be worth talking to. After that it’s all too easy to make polite excuses about how ‘lively’ it is in order to get away.

Instead, as I was about to ask for a table, one of the women from the conference called me over to where a group of them had pushed some tables together. Karen Albright was the name she’d given me, though looking back I don’t know if she had a name at all. I don’t know if she’d have needed one. I think I only remember it now because it’s so _odd_ that they gave themselves names.

I sat down and ordered my food and we started to talk about the conference so far and it was all very, very normal. Admittedly a couple of them seemed a little more interested in my opinions than I was used to but I was a bit older than the average age across the table and just figured that they must think I had more experience under my belt than most of the rest of them.

I suppose it was the eating that tipped me off first, which is maybe why I remembered the whole coffee thing now that I’m really thinking about it. They _did_ eat, of course. I’d be almost ashamed to even bother showing up here if I’d missed something that glaringly obvious. There was something about it though that wasn’t quite right. It took me a long while to figure it out because they’d almost staggered it; like the worst version of a choral round in the world.

They all ate at exactly the same pace. Fork down and up, chew not quite with a metronome’s consistency but with an odd sort of mechanical bent to it. Every four bites take a drink of water. Polite and interested conversation in between. It was… disconcerting. Admittedly not in nearly the way it would have been had they been eating wordlessly like automatons, only mimicking the vague senses of the act in equal measure to one another.

Or would that have been less terrifying?

I wonder a little bit. This felt more realistic, which I suppose was the whole point. It meant that they _knew_ that there was something they needed to hide. That something was wrong and they were aware of it, trying to do their best to fool those around them.

I don’t know if I slowed down with my own meal or became more distracted in my words or if they all just had some sort of signal that had decided to stop playing with me and begin truly showing their hand. One or two of them started to look very closely at me and I became aware that their eyes were almost glassy, no true life to them.

I started to stand, to make my excuses, when Karen grabbed my wrist with a strength that was both unexpected and entirely alarming. She _insisted_ that I join the drinks reception with them and talk with some of her friends who would absolutely love to get to know me. I tried every excuse I had: not drinking, feeling unwell, a migraine coming on.

She laughed at me, a reedy, brittle sort of a thing, and her hand tightened until I feared she might snap the bone. I know I agreed, though I can’t remember if it was an actual word or if I could only manage a noise of pain that she took as my acquiescence.

Either way I very quickly found myself surrounded by the other people, creatures, that had been at the table with me and being herded up into the hall where the drinks reception was happening.

Karen, for her -their? Its- part seemed satisfied that I was up there at all and finally let me go once she had pressed a drink to my hand. I do not know if it was as non-alcoholic as it looked. I wouldn’t have tried it for fear of something much, much worse than that. 

Instead I moved around the room, for the first time in my life desperate to talk to as many strangers as I could manage. That urge… faded quickly.

I remember the first person that I went up to distinctly: taller than average and with a mop of brown hair that could have uncharitably be called untidy but was made up for with the relative smartness of his dress. It all seemed so very normal that I… Well I had barely finished introducing myself to him before I was asking if he had noticed anything odd. If he had noticed people here that shouldn’t be.

His smile became sharp then. Eyes narrowing and head tilting as though he were a cat assessing a spider and wondering whether to pounce. “No.” He told me, very clearly and in a low amused tone. “No, everything here seems like it’s just right to me.”

I felt my throat go dry and almost could have downed my drink there if I wasn’t more afraid of the contents than of embarrassing myself. I choked out some apology, some excuse or other, and moved away as quickly as I could to another group. This time I was more careful. This time I watched their eyes and their slightly unnatural movements and made polite, expected conversation until I was thoroughly satisfied that not a one of them was human.

I moved through that room with a single minded intensity, desperate to find someone else who wasn’t part of this parade of wrong creatures. I don’t know why I did that, looking back now. It only drew me further into the room; deeper into the press of their unreality.

By the time I had been through enough of them that I was certain I was well and truly alone… I looked up to find that I was alarmingly far from the exit. While many of the creatures there seemed to be keeping up the pretext of being at this conference for the reason that they should be far too many of them had their attention obviously focussed on me.

All I could see in the room were blank eyes and, though it may have just been a hallucination from the panic that was steadily flooding my veins, a single woman whose sleeveless top seemed to show a _seam_ between her shoulders and torso.

Several of them at the edges of the room were looking at me with increasing, malicious interest at that point and when I saw some of them peel away from their groups towards me I dropped any pretext of not knowing exactly what this was and fled from the room; not caring that the glass I dropped shattered across the floor and pulled the attention of all other eyes as I left.

I fled to my room and spent the night in there wondering what the hell I had gotten myself into but at the same time almost convincing myself that maybe I’d had some sort of nervous breakdown and that none of it was real.

It was with that lingering consideration in mind that I went down to breakfast the next morning. The chatter at the tables seemed of a normal cadence and I tried not to look too closely at the speed at which they were eating in case I gave myself any further ideas.

I was partway through a bowl of fairly bland cornflakes when my phone rang. My manager, Helen Schofield. I answered it, a little confused to have her checking in with me already. She wasn’t really a one for micromanagement and the conference was due to run for another two days yet. Rather than the banal queries about what had been happening the day before, as I expected, she asked me where I was, if I was okay. I asked what she meant and she told me that I had not signed in to the conference and that she had been alerted by email as a result.

I… am not ashamed to say that I probably whimpered at that. I explained where I was and that I was indeed at the conference, though I was beginning to understand well that I was not, and what was she talking about. I had the evite in the inbox of my work’s email. Helen told me, in no uncertain terms, that it was being held at Surrey University and that I needed to get over there that day. I did not need telling twice.

There was no way that they could have overheard the conversation or know that anything had changed and yet… As I hung up I very quickly became aware that a kind of charged silence had fallen over the room and when I looked up every set of eyes in the room was trained on me. They were all smiling at me. Somehow that feels so much worse than any outright hostility might have been.

They were looking at me, still and vacant and _smiling_. I almost found myself making excuses as I stood to leave but I realised that they shouldn’t be doing that and none of them should even notice if I was going or not. None of them tried to stop me when I left but I felt the burn of their eyes following me, their heads turning just enough to track my movements back out through the restaurant.

It must have taken maybe twenty seconds but I felt sick with fear the whole time. I did not like having my back turned to a whole room full of them but I also somehow wanted to make everything I did look as normal as possible. They already knew, they had to, but I just got this awful feeling that if I had backed out the way I truly wanted to that it would have somehow alerted them or set off some reaction.

I gathered my things and I checked out with a woman who’s glassy expression and painted on smile was just as disconcerting as the others and I drove until I reached the Bird in Hand. Not for any particular reason, it was just somewhere familiar. I’d been in often enough that I knew the faces of a few of the staff there. I just wanted real human faces to chase away the memory of whatever it had been there.

It worked for a moment but the memory of it still wakes me at night in a cold sweat sometimes and I know that occasionally I’ll get the feeling, as I’m walking down the street, that I’m being watched by glassy, lifeless eyes.

_Statement Ends_


	6. Self Defence

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Day 6 - The Slaughter  
> Statement of Antoinette Grant regarding the altered behaviour of her friend Mary Wood following her enrolment onto a self-defence course.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's some violence, gore and an assumption of death in this one. All fairly canon typical, but it's the slaughter so it's a little messy.

_Statement of Antoinette Grant regarding the altered behaviour of her friend Mary Wood following her enrolment onto a self-defence course. Original statement recorded 1st May 2014. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, The Archivist.  
Statement Begins._

Haringey isn’t the worst part of the country to live in by far, but honestly young women out in London are all best to have some idea of how to keep to well-lit areas with people in, right? Not to mention the risks only go up if you’re from and ethnic minority. It only makes sense to know how to keep yourself safe.

So my friend Mary Wood signed us both up on a free intro session for an MMA class they had on over at The Rainbow centre in Barnet. It’s not the biggest place, and it’s a community centre rather than a proper gym, but it was good enough for trying things out at least. Notionally the whole thing was a single session self defence class but it was obviously set up to get interest in people coming to their regular classes.

It wasn’t like either of us minded that and a few tips on keeping your keys between your knuckles and throwing a guy when he grabs you from behind couldn’t go amiss so we went along to see what we could get out of it.

I won’t bore you with too many details about the class itself. I mean, you kind of know what to expect out of a women’s self defence session, right? You seem like someone who’s probably tried that sort of thing out. It was all pretty well as you’d expect, though the instructor was a little odd.

Her name was Rachel. I don’t think she gave a surname but I’m sure she’s still with the group online so you could probably find it if you needed it. Anyway, she was definitely the sort of person you expect to be leading a class like that: all energy and over the top enthusiasm. She seemed pretty into the job but she had this kind of anger in her eyes, like she was just a little bit stressed out the whole time with having to watch us being complete beginners.

There was this kind of weird glee to her as well. She did all the normal stuff that you expect but then she was talking about how _extreme you might be willing to get_ to get an attacker to let you go. She started talking about things like breaking noses and gouging out eyes. Said we should consider what thing we thought we would be really truly okay with doing to another person, because we shouldn’t even attempt something that we didn’t think wholeheartedly we could go through with when push came to shove.

She sounded almost as though she’d be a little disappointed with anyone who didn’t have it in them to blind a guy who attacked them.

I mean, yeah, I know that if you’re gonna just attack someone on the street you deserve exactly what you get nut, like, you can’t just _expect_ that someone would be okay with that level of violence purely based on them showing up to a self defence class once. Right? Like that’s fair enough if you’re talking to people who are really invested in it or who have already had to do some of the lower level stuff kicking a guy in the balls to give them time to run, but just regular women turning up? I dunno, it just seemed pretty weird.

Mary loved it though. She thought it was a real laugh to have a woman talk so openly about really thinking what you should do to a man who might hurt you. She’d just come out of a relationship that wasn’t exactly great and I think she was in that stage of being a bit vindictive and down on men in general. I couldn’t really blame her, he was an arsehole.

I got what I wanted out of that session, which was honestly just feeling a little bit more like I could get myself in a position to do a runner if the worst came to the worst. Mary… Well, she signed up for the Thursday night MMA classes pretty much the second it ended.

When I asked about it she admitted that it was partly because she just hated how much of a pushover everyone thought she was. She wanted to be able to defend herself, and the keeping fit bit of it was enough of a bonus, but what she really wanted was some of the confidence that the trainer seemed to be so full of: like she’d never in her life been afraid of a man walking too quickly behind her, or of a weird shadow down an alleyway. She just wanted to feel safe. I’m sure of it.

It was why the next few weeks were so strange to me. Mary and I didn’t work together or anything but we did get together once or twice a week for lunch or a coffee after work. It happened slowly enough that I didn’t really notice at first. She was all enthusiasm about the class and a promotion she was looking forward to at work. I almost wouldn’t haven noticed if I saw her every day, I don’t think, but she seemed to get… sharper? It’s the best way I have to describe it at least.

She wasn’t really cruel, or even angry. She was just maybe that bit more impatient, a little more snippy about things that didn’t really matter all that much. She started going to those classes twice a week instead, saying that it helped her blow off steam but honestly if anything she only seemed to get sharper still for it.

For a while it just seemed to be a general impatience with life but before long it was drifting out onto me. Even her sister Margaret, who I spoke to occasionally at church, seemed to find that she was getting short with her too where they’d never had anything but patience for one another.

Then came the night she turned up at my apartment. It was round the end of March, start of April. I was just drifting off, so it must’ve been around midnight, when my phone went off. I was too groggy at first to properly realise what it was and tried to turn it off like it was my alarm. It wasn’t until the second time it rang that I realised and picked up.

No points for guessing that it was Mary on the other end. She was slightly breathless in a way that I mistook for panic at first, her words coming out so fast I had to get her to repeat herself. She said that she’d been attacked _again_ and that she’d been close to my place and could she come in. Well, I was hardly going to say no to that. I was almost instantly completely awake and asking what she meant by ‘again’ but she said all of that could wait until she got in somewhere safe. Well I wasn’t about to argue with that so I got into my slippers and buzzed her in.

I set off the kettle before I went to open the door and even in that time she was knocking on it with this kind of urgency that made me think they might have followed her into my building. I know that it could have wasted precious time but I was scared myself and I checked the peep hole first to be certain that there wasn’t anyone in the corridor with her.

She was… well she was alone, if not actually fine by the look of it. I locked, chained and bolted the damn door the second that she was into the house, by which point she was already in the kitchen and running the sink to start washing off the blood that was on her arm.

It all came out fairly quickly. She’d never had much trouble beyond a bit of catcalling and some general creepiness before. I mean yeah that’s pretty bad but it’s something a lot of people have to put up with in their lives. Apparently though this was the second time she’d been followed and attacked in a single week.

I was terrified about it, asked if she’d contacted the police or made sure that someone knew what had happened and where. She pulled a face like I’d asked some sort of stupid question, if anything washing harder at the cut on her arm. It looked deep. She said that the guy who followed her had a knife and instead of afraid she just sounded angry. Maybe even a little offended.

I asked… Well I asked a lot. What had happened, where, if she needed to go to the hospital, if the guy was still out there. She kind of brushed off the rest of the questions, like it was annoying to be asked if you needed to get seen for a knife wound. That last question though… She went kind of still and for a moment the only sound in the house was the kitchen tap running. I think I expected her to burst into tears, for it to all have kind of caught up to her in that second.

Instead she just said, very carefully, “You don’t need to worry about him any more. No one does.”

I wanted to ask what she meant but I was almost afraid of the answer. I decided that it was better not knowing. She had this hard glint in her eyes like she was still ready to lash out and I didn’t want it to be against me. That time I just kept quiet, just carefully told her that I thought she was best to go to the hospital and report it but that I wasn’t going to push.

She said she was going to see if there was a more _in depth_ self defence course she could go to at the centre. I really didn’t want to know what that meant but I know that my guess was pretty close. It kept happening though. She’d turn up to lunch with wounds or bruises or this truly vicious look in her eyes. It didn’t take me long to piece together that it was happening most often when she got out of those classes.

I half suspected that Rachel was setting them up, or else that she had made some pretty mean enemies that were trying to shut her down, but apparently none of them ever actually mentioned it. It was just like these violent, terrible people were seeking her out for something.

I tried to get her to stop going, to convince her that there was something about the route back that was unsafe maybe, but it only made her more intense about the classes. Outside of work and the few times I could get her to just sit and chat she… everything was about getting strong enough that she couldn’t be hurt by these people who suddenly wanted to out of nowhere.

I know she took to carrying a knife when she went out. She showed me it once. Not the most obvious thing in the world, a hunting knife if what she told me is right, blade was maybe a couple of inches long. It scared me.

She was certain that it was the way to go and it made me dread what might come out of it. I… I said I was going to start coming to one of the classes with her, see if walking back in numbers helped. She complained a little, said I’d find it difficult after not being there for so long and seemed a bit put out but honestly she seemed happy with the fact that I’d stopped trying to get her to go somewhere else and agreed to it pretty quickly.

I admit, the class was intense. Martial Arts has never really been my sort of thing and that were all… pretty intense about it. I assumed that people would kind of join on when they got interested so there’d be a mix of levels but I could tell I was out of place within the first ten minutes.

Still, I kept to it. I really thought that safety in numbers was a consideration back then. For a few weeks at least it seemed to work. Mary and I had a coffee together on the Wednesday about two weeks in and had this kind of smugness about her when I asked it, showing a few too many teeth and telling me that I didn’t want to know. I really didn’t, though I can’t help but wonder now if things would have gone any differently if I’d pressed the issue.

The third Thursday that I went to the class with Mary we were attacked. We were nearly halfway to my flat when I became aware of a group of four men following behind us. I thought I was the first to notice but when I squeezed Mary’s hand and tried to get her to speed up she just kind of… huffed at me, like she was annoyed. She pulled her hand away and stood waiting for them.

I told her to stop being silly, that we needed to get home. Useless as it was I even said hi to the men who’d been following us, as though it all might have been part of my imagination. It quickly became apparent that it was not.

They swaggered over all brash catcalling and one of them reached out for Mary. She had that knife out quicker than I knew how to process it. Maybe it’s just the shock of it though. She turned on them, told them to back off but it was… She didn’t really sound like that’s what she wanted. She said that they should turn around and get lost while they still could.

Everything changed in a second. All of that mocking and bigging it up just completely turned into hatred. They wanted to hurt her, hurt _us_ , just for the sake of hurting. To teach her a lesson about trying to tell them to back off, I think. I know that and yet… I saw what was in Mary’s eyes when she rounded on them and attacked that way.

She was so much quicker than they were. They tried, they really did, and one even managed to get out a knife of his own in the scuffle but, honestly? It was a slaughter. I saw her go for the one with the knife first, whether to get him out of the way or because she saw it as more justified I don’t know. I just know I saw the glint of that knife disappear and the man cursed at her like nothing I’ve ever heard before as the others jumped on like they could overpower her.

She did go to the floor after a few seconds but it wasn’t long until the screaming started. It wasn’t from her. In the middle of the guys I thought I saw more knives. If I… if I was more superstitious or… I might have said it was claws. Could have called it a demon. But there were only those men and Mary in there.

Still, when one of them was flung off, the thing I saw underneath… I ran. One guy was already crumpled against the side of the alley and bleeding out but was still snarling and trying to move back in to attack. The thing in the middle of them didn’t look like Mary though and I was suddenly too scared to even think about staying there. I thought I was going to pass out or, or throw up. So I just ran.

I… I’m not going to go to the police about it, I don’t really know how. She’s still my friend and I know that they meant to harm us just as badly, hell they even moved first. I just…

I’m going to move. I’m going to move far away and pray deeply that nothing like this ever happens to me again. Honestly I’m probably going to block Mary’s number too, though she hasn’t tried to call me since it happened. I don’t even know…

I hope she’s okay. I hope someone more persuasive than me can get her to stop going to that class, stop taking that same route home at night. I think she wants to, though, so I don’t really think anything will change until she’s stopped everyone who tries following her or someone stops her.

_Statement ends._


	7. Separate

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Statement of Emily Desanges regarding odd happenings in the home she shared with her ex-girlfriend. Statement given 4th December 1987.
> 
> Day 7 - The Lonely

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This features lonely-typical depression and a character wishing they didn't exist.  
> This one might be a bit much given all the isolation at the moment but the lonely is my fear aspect and I couldn't resist.

_Statement of Emily Desanges regarding odd happenings in the home she shared with her ex-girlfriend. Statement given 4th December 1987. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, The Archivist.  
Statement begins._

I’m not a really clingy person, not usually, and I’ve never had much bother with intimacy in relationships before but I don’t know. Either I came on too strong or Jude was just a bit like that, you know? Okay, so I guess the statement isn’t really _about_ my relationship with Jude, Judith Lukas, but it all started getting weird right after we broke up. Maybe it even started a little bit before that, it was sort of the reason we did break up. Even though it wasn’t. I suppose that doesn’t make the most sense but it’s the best way I know how to put it. 

You see, the thing that happened to me, it was about keeping me separate from the world, from other people, I know it was. And it’s all of _that_ that started my break up with Jude, when it all started to go a bit weird. So it all seems to track back from that point.

I mean at first everything was pretty good with our relationship. Jude was always independent, more than happy to be her own person. It was pretty great to be honest. She was exactly my kind of funny, which is very deadpan and a little bit acerbic, but she was sweet in her own way and was always considerate of the few close friends we had.

It went well enough that after the first six months I moved into her place. It was huge, to say it was for one person and I pretty quickly understood what she meant about the family “having money”. I don’t think half of the time she even noticed; just went about her life like it was all so normal. Didn’t matter to me of course, it had just been a bit of a surprise the first time I’d seen it.

Either way things were going well, and then they were going less well. A few years in and I’d kind of been talking about an ‘engagement’, as impossible as that is. Just something for the two of us, you know? No one’s family or workplaces had to know about it but I just wanted something that proved it all somehow.

Looking back, thinking of it that way should have been a bit of a warning in its own right. That I thought I needed to prove it to myself somehow.

At first it really was good. Jude didn’t actually need me around but that was actually pretty nice. I’d been necessary a lot in my life but to be with someone just because they wanted me there? It was a bit novel and more than a bit intoxicating.

Of course, after a while, not needing me around started to feel more and more like she didn’t care if I was around or not. She’d be off and doing her own thing, even if we were in the same room as the house. I like that to a degree but it was just all the time. Like it wouldn’t matter if I was there or not. Yeah, I could get her to spend time with me but… Well… At first it was like she didn’t _mind_ it exactly but she never suggested it herself, it was always me asking her to just spend time together, to just _be_ with each other. After about a year though? It almost felt like she was resentful of it sometimes. She was all too happy to just kind of exist in proximity to each other. I don’t know if she was just worried about what other people might think or if she just hadn’t really planned on what it meant to actually live with a person. Maybe it _was_ just that she got tired of me somehow. Not really the point though, I guess.

The point is that she drifted away and I started feeling- well, I guess lonely, even with her right there in the house with me. Like we were ghosts living separate lives together. Either way she seemed so distant during every moment that wasn’t cooking together, which was actually really nice usually, or breakfast around the table, which was a thing she was weirdly a stickler for.

Eventually I broke and made her actually talk to me about it. She seemed distraught, if I’m honest. Said that she was doing as much as she could but that I was just _around so much_ and talking to her and that she didn’t know how to deal with that. I… didn’t take it great? If I’m honest. It was probably a sign of something weird in a past relationship or her family but I just thought it was her way of accusing me of smothering her or being clingy.

She didn’t seem to want to break up with me though, even though she never really felt _there_ even when we were together. She suggested a bit of a break and I moved into one of the many spare bedrooms in the house.

It felt oppressive. That feeling, that we were just ghosts missing each other because we weren’t really in the same place, it got worse if anything. I would sometimes still go into her room and spend an hour or two cuddling while she read. Sometimes it was like nothing had changed and I wished so hard that I knew what to do to make it better, but sometimes it was like she was hardly there. I don’t mean in terms of her attention either. Like, I’d be there laying on her and it wouldn’t be warm, just kind of the same temperature as everything else, and I’d feel like if I dared to look up at her I really would see a ghost and I’d just pass right through. She never sought me out, except for meals.

I was about to suggest that we call it quits altogether when I lost my job. Which, is of course how these things go.

I got more stressed and I think by that point it was me pulling away more than Jude. I started to cook separately from her and that seemed to be the thing that made her realise that we were getting further apart rather than it fixing things.

She was… sweet about it. Sometimes that’s the worst thing about it.

She said nothing much had to change. If I already felt like we weren’t really dating, I could keep going about things, pay a little rent where I could and call myself a housemate.

I’m not too proud to say that it just about broke me. Relying on the kindness of a person who couldn’t do more than be in the same room as me even when we were dating? The fact that she really did seem to care _about_ me but was somehow completely unaffected by us breaking up. She was so matter of fact about it all, like she’d disjointed all of her emotions from the process and was just being logically a good person. Said that we could still be friends, if I liked. It was all a bit much.

I didn’t even really have anyone to turn to. My family has no idea that I’m gay and I’d never been out in the workplace, regardless of the fact that I’d just left it. It wasn’t until after I’d ‘moved’ myself fully into a different room that I realised that I’d been kind of drifting away from the few friends that I had in the community for the couple of years I’d been with Jude.

She didn’t really do going out with groups of people and I guess I’d just become used to time reading or whatever together and never really noticed. Wasn’t that she would have stopped me from going out but I guess I’d wanted as much time as I could when it never really filled this sense that I was still missing her.

So there I was in a strange room in an otherwise empty house that I was sharing with my ex. I could have gone out, found a bar, got drunk, tried to rekindle some of those friendships. Somehow it felt like all too much. Some part of me also worried that they wouldn’t want me back. Thought it must have seemed like a real bitch move to get a girlfriend and then just slowly ghost them. So instead I just stayed in.

I locked myself up in that room and only really came out for food and to do what rudimentary signing on and applying for jobs when I had to. Some days I could barely do that. On really bad days I might not move from the room at all; just walking everything over in my mind to wonder how I’d come to this point. I guess looking back I’d probably call it depression but at the time I just thought I was being lazy and it did nothing to help the feeling that I was losing touch with the world around me and that things would continue to go along just fine if I wasn’t there.

Sometimes it came to me as this cold sweat that would wake me up in the middle of the night; feeling like a ghost haunting the house and that the world had already moved on without me and forgotten I ever existed. That truly no one cared that I was gone from their lives.

The only real interaction I had with Jude was if we crossed paths when we were cooking, though I’d started skipping meals altogether, and passing on bits from the welfare. She obviously wasn’t hurting for the money and didn’t really bring it up outside of me chipping in what I could. I think she could have forgotten it entirely. Well, I _know_ that she could have forgotten it entirely. She did. I’m pretty sure she entirely forgot me too.

She wasn’t the only one. More often, I had people bumping into me on the street and looking almost offended that I’d had the audacity to be in the way. Or worse, confused that I was there at all. Sometimes I’d have to call three or four times to get someone’s attention, end up overlooked anyway. Before long I stopped trying after the first couple of times. It just wasn’t worth it.

Before long I stopped going out altogether; my entire world compressed down into this house that wasn’t mine shared tentatively with this person I never saw. I avoided Jude hard once the welfare dried up altogether but she never came looking for me. She never had.

For a while that meant eating erratically and at strange times but I look back now and I think maybe weeks passed where I didn’t eat at all, barely moved other than to wander listlessly when Jude wasn’t at home or when I thought she was in bed asleep.

Everything just seemed to get less real, or like I was the one who wasn’t really. I certainly felt numb enough for it, like nothing was touching the edges of me. Everything I should have felt was as dull and distant from me as the people in my life.

It got to the point where I could pass Jude in the bottom hallway while going up the stairs and she just didn’t seem to notice I was there. I felt like maybe I could go away, make it all go away, but there was something missing that I hadn’t done yet. That there was something I needed to do before I could stop pretending I was a real person.

One day, well, it was the 9th of July, I just couldn’t have told you where that was compared to all the rest of it. Anyway, on the 9th I heard something that I could barely understand at the time but it felt like a bright light in the fog of the rest of my existence at that point.

I found myself drawn down to the living room and I honestly couldn’t tell you if I walked or just kind of _was_ there, though of course I must have walked. I saw Jude there, curled up in the corner of the couch with the summer sun across her hair and she had this book, half discarded on her knees and she was just… laughing.

She looked happy. Beautiful. She sounded bright. It… hurt. Weirdly enough, it hurt, right deep down in my chest. I started crying, and once I’d started I couldn’t stop. It was the first thing I’d felt outside of a sense of numbness and disconnect in ages and no matter the pain of it, I didn’t _want_ to let it go. I didn’t want to go back to not feeling anything, or like anything mattered.

We broke up, as it were, in August and it was almost a year later when I heard that laugh from her again. I still can’t account for how so much time passed. It scares me sometimes, to think of how little of those past 5 or 6 months I can truly recall, that weren’t shrouded in this feeling of being not real, being cut off from the world.

She jerked like a ghost really had manifested in the middle of the room and started up with the wailing and shaking of chains. For a moment she didn’t seem to remember me at all, mouth working uncertainly around the vague shape of my name. I felt even that pain starting to close itself off from me, felt the numbness seeping back into the bones of me as I realised that I could have moved out in the months before and that she wouldn’t have known. That she apparently hadn’t realised I was still there at all.

I think I only blinked and she was a flurry of movement. She grabbed my cheeks and… it must have been because I hadn’t been touched in so long but the first time she tried it almost felt like she went through. It was probably just that she was being so slow and careful about it that she didn’t make contact when I thought she should have. I nearly collapsed when I felt the warmth of her skin against me and I threw myself into her arms in what was probably a very uncomfortable display from your ex.

Then she was apologising, of all things. Not just about kind of forgetting that I was supposed to be a housemate. That was there and everything but she was also talking like it was somehow her fault. She was saying things like she hadn’t realised how far it had gone and that she never would have left me there if she had realised and that she shouldn’t be trying to be with people because this was what happened.

It was weird. I probably should have been a little offended that she was making it about herself, but I didn’t really know what _it_ was. I’m not too certain even now. Either way she was talking like she should have known that it would happen. I mean, the situation wasn’t her fault, or the fact that I’d taken it so hard, but there was something else in it. Something that seemed to match up to that feeling of detachment.

Once I stopped clinging to her in what is, in hindsight, a very embarrassing way she tried to help me get my life on track as best she could. She insisted that I should move out which was terrifying at first because I didn’t know if I could stomach being truly alone when I had already felt adrift sharing a house with someone. Still, she helped me find somewhere with a more active tenant group and pushed me back into going out with friends.

It took a long time for the feeling that I should just go away somewhere to finally fade. After a few months it has and I can see that some of it just doesn’t add up. I don’t really know what your lot can do with it but I figured… Well, I don’t know. You collect all these kinds of stories, though I don’t know how much a haunted house or a weird break up interest you. It’s just that I’m trying to talk to people again, to feel real again, and I don’t know how I can do that when I have to hold out on some of the more bizarre bits of it all. So there you go. Don’t know if you can check out the house or anything. I guess I’m done? I think? Yeah, that’s about it.

_Statement ends._


	8. DASH

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Statement of Matthew Strickland regarding his experiences in ‘psychically’ coercing traumatic information from clients at a domestic abuse service.  
> Day 8: The Beholding, The Eye, The Ceaseless Watcher.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the big one: There are a lot of potential triggers here around Domestic abuse, retraumatisation, being unsafe in a therapy and support situation. This is heavy and pretty intense. Please take care before going in.

Statement of Matthew Strickland regarding his experiences in ‘psychically’ coercing traumatic information from clients at a domestic abuse service. Original statement given 1st April 2009. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.  
Statement begins.

One of the biggest bits of bullshit I hear in the course of my job is that if the children don’t see it and don’t hear it then they’re safe from it. Hell, there are even some that dare say that as long as they’re not the ones in the line of fire it doesn’t count. I know there’s a whole thing about clean language while you write down statements but that’s the only word for it. Bullshit. Well, there are others but generally they’re worse.

There isn’t a part of domestic abuse that’s somehow easier or lesser. Every time it’s someone using their advantage to control and hurt someone else. I know your lot deal with the spooky kind of monsters but I deal with the fallout of the real human ones day in and day out. I always accepted that it was a given fact before but recently I’m getting to _know_ that it’s the case. Any of it is just as awful, just in different ways.

I work at the Sheffield Domestic Abuse Service. Recently they’ve brought in this questionnaire thing called the DASH – The Domestic Abuse, Stalking and Honour Based Violence risk identification assessment. Everyone’s supposed to know about it and use it; your police, GPs, social workers. Basically anyone frontline. Then, of course, those of us who work directly with domestic violence.

I’m technically qualified, which is part of the reason that I’m the one doing the assessments, but I’ve been volunteering with DAS pretty much since I turned 18. My mam had long since been through all the legal stuff and I knew what it was like to have to find a new, safe school. Knew about the impact it can have on you as a kid. I applied for a proper job pretty much the second one came up after I qualified. I get the feeling that they maybe held off on advertising until they knew I’d be able to apply, but I can’t prove that one.

Even in services that offer support to both men and women it’s rarer to see men doing the job. They’re the perpetrators the vast majority of the time and it means people tend to find it harder to trust men with that sort of thing. Being vulnerable in front of a bloke the size of me seems unthinkable to a lot of people, especially when they first meet me.

Thing is, I’ve always been very good at keeping myself quiet and small. It’s a skill I learned well as a child and it’s something that I think a lot of abuse victims and survivors kind of get subconsciously even when they don’t know how to put the words to it. You learn to wrap yourself up in the fear of being seen and use it to make yourself smaller.

I still remember pretty damn sharply how to look like I’m not going to cause any trouble and it’s this thing that resonates in other people that know the same thing. Even the people who come in still trembling and three sheets to the wind tend to be able to walk me through a lot of what they’ve gone through after a few minutes sat together with a cuppa. I think it helps having the perspective of it.

You see, my dad never once hurt me or my brother. You could say it was because of the way he saw my mam, you could say it was because he knew we’d grow up one day and he might not always have the advantage. The way I see it, it doesn’t really matter if you’re doing that to even one person. 

Thing is, for all he never turned on us physically, we always saw. Arguments and screaming and crashing, it was all part of the background noise of my life since I was a little kid. I don’t have a lot of memories that aren’t still tainted with the background radiation of fear.

I can remember with stark clarity the first time I was caught watching. I was scared I remember, heart pounding so hard I thought that I was going to be sick but mam was screaming more than usual and I was more afraid that she wouldn’t be there any more when I woke up. I had to see. Had to know.

I kind of assumed that I made a noise, must have cried or knocked something, but the clearer the memory gets the more I think that dad just Knew I was there with the same unnerving clarity that he could always find us when we ran. I felt the second that his eyes were on me and he _smiled_ like he was pleased with himself, sick souva- well, you get it.

He didn’t shout, in fact he got very quiet which only felt more dangerous to me. He told me that I was to watch everything and that if I looked away it would be worse. He would _make_ it worse.

Dad made me watch it from then on. If he had even half an idea I was awake, he’d either keep me there or come drag me downstairs and I’d have to stand there, silent and still, and watch. I could go over all the terrible details of it for you, but that’s more my therapist’s whole thing and to be fair it’s more so you’ve got a clue where I’m coming from.

I’ve seen a lot of this stuff. And those parts of it, the bits drenched in fear, the moments that it all went wrong and I could see that switch flick in my dad’s head? Those are the ones that sit with the most clarity in my memory. Something often changed about him in those moments and he made sure my eyes were open for all of it at a time that I had no chance of understanding it.

Maybe it was him making me so vigilant about it that pushed me towards the kind of job I do, the kind of people I gravitate to. It sometimes feels like I can see pain, see fear, on someone before I notice anything else about them. If you gave me a crowd of a hundred people right now I think that I could find my way to everyone quietly dealing with more than they can handle. To each person for whom fear is constant radio static that only gets worse when some clarifying voice finally comes through.

I always chalked that kind of thing up to my history but recently it’s getting worse, or just different.

It started to go a bit strange when I was first put onto the DASH assessments. It’s a series of questions that give you an idea of how at risk someone is of… well, of the worst. 

I’ve always had kind of an idea of if someone’s holding back information. I think most people would be surprised how under reported DA is, even with the people who come forward about it. Before I used to be able to cajole a little more out of them. Gentle little follow ups and a bit of reassurance that it’s safe can do wonders for people that desperately want to be heard and believed. It’s just a matter of taking as much of the fear out of it as you can.

It used to be, at least.

Like I said, I started doing these assessments and things… They’re more pointed and in places feel a lot more intense. They also require some pretty specific answers, so you have to push more sometimes, though generally it’s a yes/no or a number which can make it easier.

Still, it hasn’t stopped at the knowing when someone’s holding back. There’s this… It sounds weird, I know, but there’s this feeling sometimes when I ask them the questions, especially if I feel like they’ve been less than honest the first time around. There’s this thing like static and fear and the taste of copper in the back of my throat when they answer.

It’s so strange to see. Sometimes they look relieved after, or shocked, like they weren’t expecting that to come out but weren’t all that surprised. Sometimes they tell me more of the truth and it opens up that wound in them.

I’ve had people break down again, get full flashbacks and I _swear_ sometimes when they go back to that place that I go with them. Sometimes I can feel that old fear gripping hold of my muscles and freezing me in my seat and I completely forget how to ground the clients, how to pull them out of that place. I just sit and watch as it happens and feel that panicked memory take them like an unexpected wave.

It’s been changing slowly though. At first it felt like I was forced to be along for the ride, like my muscles had been frozen. Now it feels, almost, like… it sounds mental I know but like being fed. Like I’m filled with it but instead of it going up to the neck and threatening to drown me like it used to, it fills up this place that seems to get empty more quickly every time it happens. This thing that I used to dread because it would seize my body up, I now find myself leaning towards when I feel the beginning of that pressure stir.

Sometimes now I feel like I can see these things, not like I’m viewing it but like it’s my own memory, just from them answering the questions as long as I get that shiver of fear before they start. It’s only more intense if they get that betrayed look on their faces and I know that they’re fighting against telling me more.

It’s part of why I looked into giving your lot a statement. Part of my development stuff I did some research online to try and see if it was a thing that happened a lot. Spent a lot of time feeding back into the DASH developers and seeing if anyone else was finding weird responses like that. Nothing from them, but a few weird Reddit posts did come up about Institute researchers approaching them and then feeling, like, forced to tell the truth to them no matter how much they wanted to keep quiet or how painful and retraumatising it was to go through. I thought it might mean you had some sort of idea of the psychological technique behind it, how to stop it.

I don’t know what to do any more. There’s something… I don’t know. There’s something powerful in it and sometimes it scares me how much I enjoy that. You’d think someone like me would know better, right? But there’s something about seeing it all so clearly, about _knowing_ without a doubt that the answers I’m getting are true and so much more accurate than anyone else could. I want to call it pride in my job but I think that would be lying to myself.

There’s something about the way that the fear tastes… I think I’m starting to enjoy it.

Do you know that different fears taste different? Feel different? I know it’s monstrous, I _know_ but there’s something about the terror that wells up when they talk about choking, the way it crushes my own throat and floods along the skin in heat. I almost look forward to the times that I get that buzz when I ask question 18.

There are other ones too. Threats or harm against children and dependants; that one’s like a cold stone in the stomach but it’s a familiar taste almost like fizzy cola bottles. The things that mam used to give us to feel better in my own childhood. Asking if the abuser has threatened suicide; it’s like acid in the throat. There’s fear but malice and I can feel the control in it. 

There’s something telling me that I could do so much more, that there’s further to go. I don’t even know what that could mean and though it makes me tremble, it could just as easily be anticipation as fear.

I don’t want to lose myself to it but at the same time I don’t know how not to. I sometimes feel like a kid again; swept along and made to watch as the truth of a terrible world is opened up before me in a way that I have no chance of understanding.

This time I’m less afraid of what I see. All that fear seems to belong to other people now and solely exists to seek out in others and to draw closer to the surface. I’m worried about what I’m becoming. I’d appreciate any help, any _thing_ that you can suggest that’s similar to help to mitigate what I’m becoming. Maybe even just suggest some other way to do this that doesn’t get me fired. More and more people are are refusing to talk to me at all after our initial session and I can feel that their fear now is of me.

_Statement ends_


End file.
